True crime did not begin with the podcast Serial in 2014. It began with the pamphlets sold to the crowd on the way to a public execution. The appetite has not changed in two hundred years. The only real difference is that we now call some of it journalism.
“I’m not a police officer or a private detective. Not even a crime reporter. But every day this year, I’ve been trying to get a grip on a seventeen-year-old boy’s alibi.” That is roughly how Sarah Koenig opened the first episode of Serial, which reinvestigated a murder from 1999 and passed five million downloads at a speed nobody expected.
It set the standard for an entire genre built on dramatising real crimes and real tragedies. True crime is now the fastest-growing documentary genre there is, and the appetite for peering into the abyss of human violence appears to be bottomless.
None of this is new
Morbid curiosity has always been with us. For most of history, public execution sites were about as standard a local institution as recycling centres or neighbourhood pizzerias are today.
As recently as 150 years ago, public executions in Sweden were spectacular events. Popular entertainment, often deliberately prolonged and painful. Families dressed up and attended together. Stockholm’s last public execution, in 1862, drew a crowd of 4,000 people in a city of just over 100,000. Proportionally, that is Serial.
The interest was stoked in advance by pamphlets, sold beforehand, offering detailed and sensationalised accounts of what the condemned had done. The nineteenth century had content marketing too.
Standing on the spot
I happen to live not far from where that execution took place, so I went to look. There is nothing to indicate what once happened there. A small patch of woodland still borders some modest houses built in the 1940s. Otherwise it is entirely ordinary, and the ordinariness is the strange part. A quiet residential street standing on what was once a public stage for death.
The crime turned out to be a robbery, rape and murder, described in the pamphlet as “committed under circumstances so horrid that humanity shudders at the thought”. It recounted every stab and cry of anguish, except for the sexual assault itself, which was replaced with a footnote. “What follows hereafter we have, out of decency, been compelled to exclude.”
Thankfully, someone had a sense of limits. Perhaps that pamphlet editor felt, for a moment, the same flicker of indignity Sarah Koenig would put into words 150 years later. Perhaps that footnote was an early draft of what we now call journalistic ethics. It is reassuring to see how far we have come.
How close can we get and still call it entertainment
France’s last public guillotining, in 1939, ended in chaos as spectators pushed forward to soak up the victim’s blood with handkerchiefs for souvenirs. When the United States held its last public hanging in 1936, the New York Daily News sent journalists by aeroplane to get the photographs home faster.
We consider all that barbaric now. Yet a survey in 2014 found that roughly a third of young men in Western countries had watched at least part of an ISIS beheading video, usually through news links or social media rather than by going looking. When the American Nick Berg was beheaded in 2004, “Nick Berg beheading video” was the second most searched term online for a month. It was beaten by “American Idol”.
What Serial actually invented was not the appetite. It was the structure. Listeners could follow an investigation unfolding in real time, question the original inquiry, and entertain the possibility that the convicted man was innocent. That is what made it compelling, and it was compelling precisely because it was real.
Watching Luke Skywalker lose a hand is dramatic, but it is fiction, and you have to lean in for it to land. If it happened to someone you knew it would simply be trauma. Adding a hint of reality, approaching the edge of the abyss without falling in, raises the stakes enormously. The question the genre never quite asks itself is how close we can get and still call it entertainment.
The purest example
The Jeffrey Epstein case might be the clearest of all. A convicted sex offender with ties to presidents, royalty and billionaires, found dead in a cell under suspicious circumstances. Power, sex, conspiracy, and a mystery that may never be solved.
The public appetite has been enormous, and not because people are especially invested in justice for the victims. The story is simply too juicy to resist. News outlets covered it with exactly the same breathless intensity as any streaming series. The only difference is that they called it journalism.
The thread
There is a clear line running from the sensationalised murder pamphlets of the nineteenth century to modern true crime podcasts, and it runs straight through the news. Amanda Knox. Ted Bundy. JonBenét Ramsey. Jeffrey Dahmer. Madeleine McCann. We have been marinated in true crime under the label of news our whole lives, packaged as information and served as entertainment.
There is even a quiet self-awareness in what the genre selects. Stories involving children are mostly avoided, too dark to pass as entertainment. Cases involving young women, often portrayed as having made questionable choices, dominate. As if the audience needs to feel the victim was somehow complicit in order to enjoy it guilt-free. That is not the behaviour of people seeking justice. It is the behaviour of people choosing which tragedies are acceptable to watch.
I am not pointing fingers. Perhaps I would have stood there in my Sunday best in 1862, waiting for the axe to fall. Perhaps you would have stood beside me with a pamphlet in your hand.
But it is worth being honest about what we are doing. If you want information about crime, the FBI publishes annual reports and the statistics are freely available. If you want entertainment, there is a great deal of it that does not require a real family’s worst day. And if you insist on true crime, you might as well listen to Serial, which at least had careful production, slow pacing and fifteen years of distance from the tragedy. That is a luxury news media cannot afford.
Single dramatic events almost never tell us anything meaningful about reality. They grab attention and stir emotion, and beyond a brief factual report they are entertainment for everyone except the people living inside them. What follows thereafter we should, for the sake of decency, omit, and let those people grieve in peace.
Go home. The gallows closed long ago.
Is true crime a modern phenomenon?
No. Public executions were mass entertainment for centuries, and pamphlets sold in advance offered sensationalised accounts of the crime. Stockholm’s last public execution in 1862 drew 4,000 people in a city of 100,000. The appetite is old. Only the delivery has changed.
What did Serial actually invent, if not the interest in real crime?
The structure. Listeners followed an investigation unfolding in real time, could question the original inquiry, and could seriously consider that the convicted man might be innocent. That format, rather than the subject matter, is what produced the flood of imitators.
What is the connection between true crime and ordinary news?
There is a continuous line from nineteenth century murder pamphlets to modern podcasts, and it runs through news coverage. Stories like Amanda Knox, Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Epstein are packaged as information but consumed as entertainment. The Epstein coverage is the clearest case, treated with the intensity of a streaming series and called journalism.
If I want to understand crime, what should I read instead?
Official statistics rather than individual cases. The FBI publishes annual crime reports, and most countries have equivalents. A single dramatic case tells you almost nothing about risk or trend, while the statistics tell you both, and neither will keep you up at night for the wrong reasons.
